


a shock to bring me back

by indigostohelit



Category: Atomic Blonde (2017)
Genre: Berlin (City), Cigarettes, Cold War, F/M, Ghosts, Light Dom/sub, Masturbation, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 14:50:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11739309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: Lorraine Broughton goes to war, home, and Berlin, not necessarily in that order.





	a shock to bring me back

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains a higher-than-reasonable amount of German, which is not translated. I've tried to make meanings clear through heavy use of cognates, or at least through context. Failing that, I've made sure that Google Translate will deliver a good translation of all the sentences.
> 
> Title from "A Girl, A Boy, and a Graveyard", by Jeremy Messersmith.

She spends a month in the States before they put her back in the cold, and all that time she isn't haunted once.

Sometime in the seventies, on a rooftop in San Francisco, she'd asked Aleks about it. She'd been younger then; on the job a year, maybe two, and her sleep still clear and her hands still soft as silk. It had been summer, and the fog had been settling on the city like a parachute, billowing and grey.

"It's not a country for ghosts," he'd said. He'd been only a few years her senior, twenty-five or twenty-six, and it had felt as wide as the world.

She'd said, "I don't understand."

"You wouldn't," he'd said, hissed smoke out into the mist. "It's not like London - not like Moscow. It's empty, here. There's no depth to it."

She'd raised an eyebrow, tilted her head towards the edge of the rooftop, the street forty feet below; he'd waved a hand. "It's not the same. You have to understand - the Americans, they eat and drink cars and gasoline, they breathe in cinema, they breathe out advertisements. They are like children. They believe what they are told, they learn how to act and speak from the television. They have no history. They are flat - like a comic book."

"So no ghosts," she'd said.

"No ghosts," he'd agreed. "You'll need to go to Moscow to see yours again." His smile in the pre-dawn mist had been quick, faded and white, like a slash through paper. "If you want them."

As she's climbing the stairs at Stadtmitte she feels a hot huff in her ear. She resists the urge to slap it - drawing attention, she's just got here, for fuck's sake - and pulls her coat tighter around herself.

_Bist du kalt, Engel?_ says a voice behind her. _Ich kann dich aufwärmen_. She doesn't turn to look. It's a man, just a man, someone who's seen a woman on the street and thinks he's clever - and besides, the voice is too high -

Out of the station, into the street, scattered with snow the dirty grey of old newspaper. The wind is nipping at the back of her neck, harsh and urgent, and she hurries down Charlottenstraße, past the supermarkets and empty lots, past the young men with wild eyes and hair in a hundred colors huddled together in alleyways, the buildings standing grey and huge and heavy, shoulder to shoulder. Faster than she meant to, faster than she ought to, and the woman at the front desk slaps a key into her hand, and she's up the stairs, into her room, sitting on a rickety old bed, her hand on her forehead, breathing like she's just run a mile.

"You oughtn't have looked so frightened," says Percival, from the chair by the television. "She'll remember you."

Her head is aching.

"God forbid," he says, "we be remembered," and then he smiles at her, wide and wild and sad. There's blood leaking from the hole in his forehead.

"Let her," she says. "I'm not here on business."

"Liar," he says, and vanishes.

She looks, for the first time, at the chair where he sat. 

Then she stands up, picks it up with one hand, pushes it into the shoebox closet, and quite calmly slams the door.

.

The war is over.

_If you want it!_ says Kurzfeld, and laughs until the pay phone buzzes into static.

The war is over; elections are coming. Lorraine learns new words -  _Allianz_ and _Sozialdemokratische_ and _Aufbruch_ \- almost out of curiosity, writes translations on her hand on the U-Bahn: _people's chamber_ , _people's cell_. She speaks halting German to bartenders, wurst-sellers, men on the street; she widens her eyes, ducks her chin, smiles apologetically.  _Ich habe gelebt in Berlin für zwei Wochen_ _. Helfen mir?_

The first free elections, say the young Easterners, sitting in blue jeans and lipstick on the sidewalk, since the Third Reich. The first in their lives; and they smile at her, raise joints to her lips behind bars after midnight.

The older Easterners say nothing. She pushes one of them too hard, on a cold afternoon when the snow is in her socks and melting on her nose; he hisses at her,  _sind_   _Sie Stasi?_  and looks horrified, and then disgusted at his own horror.

BER-1 is a young man, younger than her, with dark hair slicked back and thin lips. His German's smooth and easy, like a native's, and whenever he looks at her he smirks as if she can't see his face.There's dirt under his nails. He's been on the job a little over two years. This is his first fieldwork outside the States, he says, as if she's expected to like that, to want to take care of that.

A week in she walks in on him fucking a source, his nails digging so hard into her hips they're leaving marks. She leans against the doorway and tucks her hands into the pockets of her coat.

He snaps,  _Do you_ mind? 

She doesn't move.The woman says something in Turkish; BER-1 pulls out of her, rolls over, and jerks his head at the door. The woman shoves past Lorraine as he's tucking himself into his boxers, an elbow hard in her ribcage. BER-1 sighs, says,  _I guess they don't know how to knock in England?_

"He's incompetent," says Percival from the bed. He's wearing blue jeans, and that ridiculous coat, and nothing underneath.

Lorraine's not here to lecture him - BER-1, that is; she doesn't. The conversation they need to have is about the Allianz für Deutschland; they have it. BER-1 doesn't put his clothes back on, stays sprawled smirking on the bed, his bare legs weedy and pale against the dirty sheets; she expects she's meant to be impressed by that, too.

Percival is watching her. When they're done, he follows her down the stairs, so close she can feel the heat of his body, the stickiness of his blood on her back. 

"Thought you were going to ask him about me," he says.

"Americans don't have ghosts," she says, and shoves open the door against the wind. It slams shut behind her.

He falls into step with her. His torso is still bare; the blood is sliding down his stomach, dripping into the snow.

"Really," he says. "You must be _very_ lucky."

Freidrichshain is nearly empty. There's a man slumped on the corner, youths lounging against the rails by the Spree, a woman with her hood pulled over her hair hurrying past, her arms clasped protectively over her swollen belly. She dares to say, through her teeth, "Aren't I just."

"And I thought they'd've sent you home for good," he says. There's a cigarette in his left hand, now; he clicks his fingers of his right, holds the flame up to his face. "That was the point of all this, wasn't it, Genossin? Getting your  _fucking life back_?"

"You weren't in Paris," she says.

"I know every doorman and bellhop in Europe," he says, and then, "Actually, I talked to Delphine."

She says nothing, doesn't let herself blink.

He says, "I'm joking." A beat; "Don't be jealous, Lorraine. I'd never haunt anyone but you."

The snow crunches under her boots. The Spree's been frozen since New Year's, and it's only now starting to crack; she imagines she can see the water under the ice, rushing down and down.

"You _are_ jealous," he says. "Jesus, Broughton. Of  _me?_ "

"Don't flatter yourself," she says, without moving her lips.

"Which brings me back to my original question," he says, flicking sparks into the snow. "The war's over, and you haven't gone home. Haven't run off to some Manhattan brownstone with some bright young thing for you to keep in Louboutins. Severance no good? Yanks low on cash at long last?"

"Not a chance," she says, digs her own pack out of her coat. He holds the flame up to her cigarette without being asked; she inhales, lets the heat in her throat linger for a moment, and blows hard into his face.

His grin through the smoke is faint, shifting; or maybe it's his face, the blood leaking into his eyelashes, his skin like milk gone old. "He's not half as good being BER-1 as I was," he says.

"You were absolute arse at it," she tells him. The gun she used to kill him is against her ribs, cold metal on her skin, nearly as good as ice.

He says, into her ear, "Liar."

Then he's gone.

.

The elections come; the elections go. The Social Democratic Party gets eighty-eight seats; the Party of Democratic Socialism gets sixty-six. 

_It's all fucking moot_ , says Kurzfeld, who's waiting for her at Friedrichstraße with a thermos full of coffee and a file on Lothar de Maizière less than half an inch thick _Moscow's lost the Lithuanians - Estonians too. Gorbachev's lost his mind. We'll plan for Christmas in Bonn, eh?_

The Spree cracks, then melts. Lorraine walks through Lustgarten, eats currywurst by the Palast der Republik, licks ketchup off her fingers and leaves her napkin crumpled on the concrete. There are ducks under the bridge, floating in a long, solemn line; when she squints and tilts her head just right, their beaks are long and hooked, the feathers black.

Behind her hotel, on Besselstraße, a pile of bricks stands heavy with dust. She asks her landlady what it is, why the city hasn't cleared it away;  _der Krieg_ , says the woman.

_Welcher Krieg?_

The woman looks at her blankly. The idea of naming the war is alien, unthinkable; like naming the clouds, the grass in the cracks of the sidewalk, the stars.

_Erinnerst du dich an den Krieg?_ says Lorraine, and wishes she hadn't. The woman must be fifty, fifty-five; she might have been a child during the Third Reich, might had a gun pushed into her hands when the Russians came.

_Nein_ , says the woman. _Nichts_.

_Me neither_ , Lorraine says, and goes up the stairs.

"Christmas in Bonn," says Percival, from her televison. "Christ, the CIA's fucking kidding itself."

"Since when have you given a shit about politics," she says.

He's behind a news desk, his chin on his folded hands. Behind him, Gasciogne's corpse stares out at her, his lips blue, the left side of his face a mass of blood.

"It's not politics," he says, "it's the fucking game. Not one good nightclub in Bonn. Not shit except Beethoven and trains to Cologne."

"World affairs aren't decided by which city has better nightclubs," she lies, to see what he'll say.

He grins at her, leans back in his chair, laces his fingers behind his head. "If you'd been here on pleasure and not business I'd have shown you different. You know that, don't you?"

"Which is politics?" she says. "Business, or pleasure?"

"It'll change," he says, "now that the wall's down. Ask your friend Merkel; he'll tell you the same. No good if there's no Stasi waiting to beat you in the nearest alley. Takes all the joy out of a good party, it does."

The picture behind his newscaster's desk warps, then shifts; now it's Aleks, watching her at the bar, his eyes glittering and dark. "Speak for yourself," says Lorraine.

"Did you fuck him?" says Percival. "Was he good? I thought about it - not that he offered, but he would've. You know the type: long coat, fluent Russian, wants me dead, wants someone mouthy to tie to a bed and suck off til he's nearly come and then hit until he cries-"

She hits the power button on the remote control, and then, for good measure, yanks the plug out of the wall. The television whines and dies.

"-or begs," says the radio, "or both, they're not picky. Well, I'm not picky. Was he?"

"None of your fucking business," she says.

"Liar," says the radio, and hisses static.  _Gunpowder - gelatine - dynamite with a laser beam -_

She throws it in the closet, on top of the chair, and tries to light her cigarette three times. Puts the match down, spreads her fingers, watches them tremble.

Then she closes her eyes and slides her hand into her trousers, rocks against her palm. She's wet already. He'd beg so easily; it would take ages for him to mean it, ages of keeping him on the edge, letting him try harder and harder to perform just right. Can he cry on cue? He must - trained himself to gasp at the right times, throw his head back and moan like a star in the worst sort of porn film. He'd need to be hurt, and badly. He'd want it. God, let him not be there when she opens her eyes.

.

Of course she'd fucked Bremovych. Loved him, too, for a month in Leningrad, and another month in Warsaw; had loved him while she'd loved Gasciogne, even, and nearly as much.

She falls in love easily, Lorraine does. The trick isn't not feeling; the trick is not doing anything about it.

The wind's changed on her. She sits on Merkel's roof, takes the beer he passes her, tilts it to her lips. It's not quite warm enough, yet, to be in the open air without a coat: she can feel her collar against her neck, torn where she pulled the bug out.

_Will they want you back in London?_ he says.

_I don't know_ , she says, and eases herself back into his awful orange folding chair. His eyes are closed; there's an ashtray by his hand, filled with cigarette stubs. His beer is untouched.

Among the things she likes about him: he's comfortable in his silence. She watches the gold light of sunset glint off the Berliner Dom until it turns red. Then she says, _Listen, have you been haunted._

He says, _Of course_ , and, _Spyglass - his daughter, too, sometimes. Others, I don't think you'd know them_ , and,  _I thought Americans weren't_.

_We aren't_ , says Lorraine, and  _They aren't_ , and then she stares at him, at his still face, at the shadows falling long and shifting over the roof.

After some time, he says, _There's all sorts of apartments opening up, now that the Wall's down. More permanent than hotels. One on Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße. Five minutes from here, maybe less._

She waits. He says, _Come back in a week for the key, if you want it._

Nightclubs; cafes; children on the street, blasting music into the night in languages they can't speak, singing along to words they don't know. She presses men to the wall behind bars, takes slips of girls home, smiles at them, takes their phone numbers, takes their home addresses. _Ich habe gelebt in Berlin für zwei Wochen_ _. Helfen mir?_ On the television, Gorbachev blends into Yeltsin, blends into Thatcher, blends into Bush.  _You and I have memories longer than the road_ , croons the radio, long and low into the buzzing night. She lets it sing.

The Spree is running free and clear now, from West to East and out into Brandenburg. When she goes to Tiergarten, it's greening from the bottom up, grass curling out of the dead land, hard buds on the twigs of the trees, a paradise slipping cautiously out finger by finger from behind the ice. Somewhere east of the garden, the war is ending.

_\- if you want it!_

She laughs aloud. A fox startles and springs away, a streak of red.

When she opens the door to her new apartment, Percival is waiting, his thumbs tucked into his belt loops. He's wearing that coat; it's far too warm for it. 

It'll grow cold again.

"All right, then," says Lorraine, and kicks the door shut behind her, drops her bags. "On your knees."

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is less than three thousand words and has about eighty thousand words of historical notes and references.
> 
> The Allianz fur Deutschland was a coalition of a few rightist and moderate political parties in the 1990 East German election that stood for reunification with West Germany. The Social Democratic Party was a part of it, but only after the actual election. Lothar de Maizière was premier of East Germany for about six months after said elections. Bonn was the capital of West Germany, and Kurzfeld might've reasonably expected that it would stay the capital after reunification.
> 
> The Palast der Republik was a parliament building and general community center in East Berlin on the site of the old royal palace. (Today it's been demolished so that the royal palace can be rebuilt.) The flag of Prussia, and Imperial Germany, featured a black eagle.
> 
> The pile of bricks behind Lorraine's hotel is real, and really left over from World War II bombings of Berlin.
> 
> Genossin is the feminine of Genosse, meaning "partner" or "mate", with the same connotations as the English "comrade".
> 
> The thing you think is a Good Omens joke is a Good Omens joke.


End file.
